MASTER OF ARTS IN EDUCATION

Faculty/Staff

Marilyn Amey is a professor of higher, adult, and
lifelong education
and chairperson of the Department of Educational
Administration. In 2017, she was appointed as the Dr. Mildred B.
Erickson Distinguished Chair in Higher, Adult and Lifelong Education.
She
studies educational partnerships, particularly
those of community
colleges, leadership, including how leaders learn,
post-secondary
governance and administration, and faculty
concerns, including
interdisciplinary academic work. Her current work
focuses on
education partnerships including a multi-year
evaluation of a multiple-
institutional interdisciplinary consortium and
factors affecting student
transfer and degree attainment.

Laura Apol is an associate professor of literacy with a focus on
children’s/young adult literature and creative writing (poetry).
Apol has
published scholarly articles on historical children’s literature, the
intersection
between children’s literature and literary theory, the pedagogy of
children’s/YA literature and international children’s literature; she
has also
published articles on facilitating creative writing for children and
for adults,
and conducts creative writing workshops and classes for teachers
and
students on all levels. Her poetry has appeared in a number of
literary
journals and anthologies, and she is the author of several
collections of her
own poems: Falling into Grace, Crossing the Ladder
of Sun
(winner of the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry), Celestial
Bodies
(winner of the Overleaf Chapbook Manuscript Competition) and
Requiem,
Rwanda, her newest full-length collection, drawn from her
work using
writing to facilitate healing among survivors of the 1994
genocide against the
Tutsi, and translated into Kinyarwanda under the title Emwe
N’imvura
Irabyibuka (Even the Rain Remembers).

Emily Bouck’s research focuses on improving
outcomes of secondary students with high-
incidence disabilities through advances in two
strands of scholarship: standard academic
curricula (i.e., mathematics) and functional
curricula. Within these strands is a focus on how
technology can support students with disabilities
in accessing and achieving in both curricula, and
translating success to post-school experiences.

Dorinda Carter Andrews is the Associate Dean for Equity and
Inclusion
for the College of Education
and associate professor
of race, culture and equity in the Department of
Teacher Education. She is also a core faculty
member in the African American and African Studies Program. Her research is broadly focused on racial justice and educational equity. She studies issues of racial justice in P-12 learning contexts and on college campuses, urban teacher preparation and identity development, and critical race praxis with K-12 educators. Her scholarship examines these issues by illuminating voices of youth and adults who have been historically and traditionally marginalized in schools and society. Carter Andrews is co-editor of "Contesting the Myth of a Post-Racial Era: The Continued Significance of Race in U.S. Education"
(2013) and is the recipient of the 2018 Mid-Career Award from the Critical Examination of Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. She has given two TEDx
talks, "The Consciousness Gap
in Education"
and
"Teach
Kids to be Eagles." Her work has been
published
in several top-tier academic journals and social media outlets.

Janine Certo is a poet and associate professor in the Department of
Teacher Education. Her interests include contemporary poetics,
aesthetic philosophy, sociocultural perspectives of writing, poetic
inquiry, arts-based educational research, childhood education and
beginning teacher learning. She is author of "In the Corner of the
Living," first runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.
Her poetry is published or forthcoming in New Ohio Review,
Crab Orchard Review, The National Poetry Review,
Ruminate, Cider Press Review, Pittsburgh
Quarterly, Italian Americana and elsewhere. She is also
author of the book "Children Writing Poems: Poetic Voices in and out of
School" (Routledge, 2018), which focuses on sociocultural and
sociolinguistic aspects of children's poetry writing. Her articles and
essays appear in journals including Journal of Literacy Research,
Pedagogies, Journal of Aesthetic Education, English
Education, Language Arts, The Reading Teacher and
English Journal. Her writing has been supported by grants from
The Spencer Foundation and the Humanities and Arts Research
Program (HARP) at Michigan State University.

John M. Dirkx is professor and Mildred B.
Erickson Distinguished
Chair (Emeritus) in Higher, Adult and Lifelong
Education at Michigan
State University, and is Director of the
College of Education Master's
of Arts in Education (MAED) online program. His
current research
interests focus primarily on teaching and
learning in higher and
adult education contexts. Dirkx is particularly
interested in short-
term, faculty-led education abroad programs for
graduate students;
professional development for higher education
teachers in
developing countries; the role of higher
education capacity building
in international development; and the spiritual
and transformative
dimensions of adult, work-related learning.
Dirkx is current editor
of the Journal of Transformative Education, the
primary author of
A Guide to Planning and Implementing
Instruction for Adults: A
Theme-based Approach, and editor of
Adult Learning and
the Emotional Self. He has also published
numerous book
chapters and journal articles on teaching and
learning in higher and
adult education and work-related learning. He
is currently working
on a book on the transformative dimensions of
teaching and
learning.

Patricia Edwards is a professor of teacher
education, the first African American president of
the Literacy Research Association (formerly the
National Reading Conference), and the 2010-2011
President of the International Reading
Association. She has developed two nationally
acclaimed family literacy programs: Parents as
Partners in Reading and Talking Your Way to
Literacy. Her research focuses on issues related
to families and children: engaging hard to reach
families, developing a scope and sequence of
parent involvement, compiling different types of
demographic family profiles, parent involvement
and teacher thinking, parent involvement in the
reading/writing process, parent support of
children's oral preparation for literacy,
portfolio instructional conversations with parents
during regularly scheduled parent-teacher
conferences, and parents' stories of literacy and
teachers' reactions to these stories.
Her current research focuses on a broader
question - how does the world read? During her
graduate student days at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, she became curious about this
question. Therefore, when she became the newly
elected Vice-President of the International
Reading Association (IRA) in May 2008, she
immediately thought that she would return to this
question of interest. In addition, I was motivated
to ask this question because the International
Reading Association has councils and affiliates in
more than 100 countries and one of our popular
slogans is "We teach the world to read."

Carol Sue Englert is a professor of special
education. Her research interests include literacy
instruction for students at risk for school
failure with a specific focus on the examination
of discourse in literacy events. Her more recent
work involves a collaborative research project
with special education teachers to design,
implement, and integrate a literacy curriculum
emphasizing the role of oral and written language
in a discourse community.

Dr. Amelia Wenk Gotwals is an Associate Professor
of Science Education in the Department of Teacher
Education. As a former middle and high school
science teacher, she has a particular interest in
exploring the ways that students learn to engage
in science practices with core ideas in science
and the ways that curricular and assessment
materials interact with teacher instruction to
support this learning. She specifically focuses on
researching the learning progressions students
take as they develop more sophisticated
understandings and ways of assessing this complex
learning. She was the co-PI on an NSF grant, Deep
Think, that developed and tested a learning
progression and associated curricular and
assessment materials that supported 3rd-5th grade
students’ reasoning about issues in biodiversity.
She was the PI on the NSF-funded project, Learning
Progressions in Science (LeaPS), which organized
the first national conference on learning
progressions and she is the co-editor of the LeaPS
book that emanated from this conference. She was
also the PI of the Formative Assessment for
Michigan Educators (FAME) project that explored
how a statewide professional development program
can support teachers in developing formative
assessment practices.

Douglas K. Hartman is a professor of technology,
learning, and literacy with appointments in
Teacher Education and Educational Psychology and
Educational Technology. His research focuses on
the use of technologies for human learning in a
number of domains (e.g., school, community, work,
sports).

Matthew Koehler is a professor of
educational psychology and educational
technology. His research focuses on understanding
the affordances and constraints of new
technologies; the design of technology-rich,
innovative learning environments; and the
professional development of teachers. His
research examines how new technologies, such as
video and hypermedia, may be well-suited to help
learners (especially teachers) acquire new
knowledge, skills, or understanding in complex
and ill-structured domains. This has led to a
program of research about a form of knowledge,
Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge
(TPACK), that has developed theoretical,
pedagogical, and methodological perspectives that
characterize teachers who effectively integrate
content, pedagogy, and technology in their
classroom practice.

Troy Mariage is an associate professor of special
education. His research interests are in the areas
of literacy instruction for students with mild
disabilities in elementary classrooms. He has
conducted work in early reading instruction,
writing instruction, and cognitive strategy
instruction that leads to self-regulated learning.
More recently, he has extended his work by seeking
to understand how to create schools as learning
organizations that create the capacity for
continuous learning and improvement. Currently, he
is conducting a study to explore how teachers can
provide concurrent academic and social support for
students with significant learning and behavioral
difficulties.

Dr. Patricia Marin is an assistant professor in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong
Education (HALE) at Michigan State University. Her work bridges issues of
access, equity, diversity and policy in higher education. Her current research
examines research use in policy and practice, with a focus on the law. Additional
research foci include the changing nature of Hispanic Serving Institutions,
admissions policies, affirmative action, Latinx students in higher education and
diversity in college classrooms.

Her published work includes two co-edited volumes: Realizing Bakke’s
Legacy: Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, and Access to Higher
Education and Higher Education and the Color Line: College Access,
Racial Equity, and Social Change.

Before joining the MSU faculty she served as associate director of the University
of California Educational Evaluation Center. She also worked for The Civil Rights
Project (CRP) at Harvard University and the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C.

Evelyn Oka is an associate professor of school
psychology, educational psychology and a
Nationally certified School Psychologist. A
developmental and school psychologist, she is
interested in the development of self-regulation,
social
competence and motivation in school and home
contexts, particularly among students with learning
problems. Her research examines the use of a
universal social-emotional intervention to enhance
preschool children's self-regulation and social
skills in an inclusion classroom. She is also
interested in
the cultural validity and transportability of
evidence-based interventions with diverse
populations.

Cynthia Okolo is a professor of special education. Her research focuses on
improving academic outcomes for students with disabilities through the
integration of technology into the classroom. She also studies how Universal
Design for Learning (UDL)-aligned instructional practices can improve
learning
and behavior. Her current projects involve the development of literacy tools
and
strategies for using digital reading materials and teacher preparation for the
implementation of UDL. Most of her work has been conducted in middle and
high schools and in diverse classrooms that include students with and
without
disabilities. She is Past President and Professional Development Co-Chair of
the
Technology and Media Division of the Council for Exceptional Children.

Ralph Putnam is an associate professor of
educational psychology and director of the doctoral Program in Mathematics Education (PRIME). His research focuses on
the cognitively oriented study of classroom
teaching and learning and role of technology in
learning. His research has examined the
teaching and learning of mathematics in elementary
school classrooms, especially the knowledge and
beliefs of teachers as they teach mathematics for
understanding and the different ways that students
learn about mathematics from various kinds of
instruction.

Cary Roseth is a professor of
educational psychology and chairperson of the Department of
Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education. He is
interested in social
development, peer relations, and social contextual
influences on classroom achievement. His research
focuses on the development of conflict resolution
in early childhood and on the effects of
cooperation, competition, and individualistic goal
structures on children’s academic achievement and
peer relations.

Niral Shah’s research focuses on equity and
implicit bias in STEM education. Although
mathematics is often seen as “neutral” and
“race-free,” Shah’s research shows that math
classrooms are highly racialized spaces. Through
classroom observations and student interviews, he
studies how racial narratives (e.g., “Asians are
good at math”) affect classroom interaction and
serve to position students as more or less capable
of learning math. Shah also studies how
perceptions of status affect student learning in
elementary computer science. Currently, he is
developing a web-based classroom observation tool
to help STEM teachers reflect upon implicit bias
and improve their practice toward the goal of more
equitable opportunities to learn.

Riyad A. Shahjahan is an associate professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong
Education (HALE) at Michigan State University. He is also a core faculty
member
of Muslim Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies and Center for Advanced Study of
International Development. His areas of research interests are in globalization
of
higher education policy, temporality and embodiment in higher education,
cultural studies in higher education and de/anti/postcolonial theory. He has
been
conducting both empirical and theoretical work, focusing on a) the role of
transnational actors/processes (international organizations, global rankings,
media) in globalizing higher education policy; and b) rethinking the traditional
objects of study/practice in higher education (e.g. temporality, pedagogy,
and/or
globalization) from global and non- western critical indigenous perspectives.

Steven Weiland is a professor in the graduate
program in Higher,
Adult, and
Lifelong Education (in the College of Education).
He has degrees
from Brooklyn
College of the City University of New York (B.A.
in English) and
the University
of Chicago (PhD in English).

Previous to his appointment at Michigan State, he
held faculty
and
administrative positions at the University of
Michigan, the
University of
Cincinnati, the University of Iowa and the
University of
Minnesota. For much of
his career, Professor Weiland taught in
departments of English
and American
Studies. At the University of Minnesota, where he
taught courses
in literature
and the history of psychology (at the Institute
for Child
Development), he was
director of the Department of Professional
Development
Programs. He also
spent nine years as executive director of the
National Federation
of State
Humanities Councils, a non-profit organization
serving the state
programs of
the National Endowment for the Humanities. After
moving to
MSU, Professor
Weiland also spent eight years as director of the
University’s
Jewish Studies
Program in the College of Arts and Letters.

Professor Weiland’s primary interests are in the
intersections of
the humanities
and the social and behavioral sciences in the
subjects of adult
and career
development, technology and higher education,
biography and
other forms of
narrative inquiry, and in research methods,
rhetoric and writing.
He teaches
courses in career development (EAD 864) and
education in the
digital age (EAD
878) among other subjects and the college-wide
course in
research (CEP 930).
In all, Professor Weiland teaches five online
courses in two
College of
Education MA programs, all in a self-paced
hypermedia format
he has devised.
In spring 2015, Professor Weiland will offer a new
hybrid course
for PhD
students in “Scholarly and Scientific
Communications in the
Digital Age.”

Professor Weiland is the author of Intellectual
Craftsmen:
Ways and Works
in American Scholarship and of many essays on
subjects in
the
humanities and education, and he is the co-author
of
Keywords of Social
Gerontology and co-editor of Jazz in
Mind. He is at
work on
Faculty Work in the Digital Age: A Primer
and The
Scholar's Tale:
Life Stories and Intellectual Identities.

Tanya Wright is a former kindergarten teacher
whose research and teaching focus on curriculum
and instruction in language and literacy during
the early childhood and elementary years. Her
research examines instructional practices that
promote oral language, vocabulary, and knowledge
development for young children. Wright is co-
author of several books for teachers and parents
including, "All About Words: Increasing
Vocabulary in the Common Core Classroom PreK-2."
Her work has been published in journals such as
American Educator, The Elementary
School Journal, The Reading Teacher,
Reading and Writing, and Reading
Research Quarterly.

Aman Yadav’s research focuses on preparing
teachers to embed computational thinking
practices
and computing in the classroom. He is working
to
establish an evidence-based professional
development program, including continuous
online
support, to improve teachers’ knowledge to
teach
computing concepts at the high school level. In
addition, his research focuses on developing an
understanding of problem-based learning (PBL)
and
case-based instruction (CBI) in STEM
disciplines,
with a specific focus on engineering education.